Wall Street isn’t jumping into Zynga’s stock game

Zynga employees were cheering the company’s newly minted public stock this morning, but in early trading, Wall Street investors were hardly enthusiastic – the price hovered just few cents below or above the company’s the IPO price of $10 per share.

Stock in the social games powerhouse did rise as high as $11.58 per share, but then dipped to 9.48 per share. After more than two hours of trading, it was back to $10.01 per share before closing at $9.50, down 5 percent.

That’s hardly the big pop that some analysts had predicted. And so far, the reaction is nowhere near the wild reception given to professional social network LinkedIn earlier this year when its stock price more than doubled after the opening bell.

Zynga’s IPO, the biggest tech IPO since Google went public in 2004, raised $1 billion through the sale of 100 million shares.

The company has 227 million players for its social games like “FarmVille,” “CityVille” and “Mafia Wars” and a popular mobile game “Words with Friends.”

He told a gathering of cheering employees that rather than bringing all of them to New York, Nasdaq came to them. Pincus has a reputation as a hard driving boss and he seemed to acknowledged that.

“We’re a work hard, play hard kind of company,” he said. “We don’t always take enough time to celebrate these moments. I’m most guilt of that. I hope you get more than a moment … to really step back and just enjoy and celebrate this moment in time.”